Every climber learns to move with fear rather than against it. The skill is telling the useful kind from the useless kind.
Non-climbers assume the goal is to feel no fear. Climbers know better. Fear on the wall is not a flaw to be eliminated but a signal to be read, and the whole craft of climbing safely lies in learning which signals to trust and which to talk back to.
There is a useful fear and a useless one. Useful fear is your attention sharpening on a loose flake, a runout above bad protection, weather building on the horizon. That fear is doing its job, and the correct response is to slow down, assess, and sometimes back off. Ignoring it is how accidents happen.
Useless fear is different. It is the flood of panic that arrives on ground well within your ability, on solid rock with good gear, simply because you are high off the deck and your body has decided that is unacceptable. This fear lies. Learning to breathe through it, to keep your feet moving and your eyes on the next hold, is a skill that develops only with mileage.
The way to build that skill is not to hurl yourself at things that terrify you, but to expand your comfort zone at its edges, one manageable step at a time. Climb a little harder, a little higher, in situations where the real risk stays low, and your nervous system slowly recalibrates what counts as an emergency. Courage, it turns out, is mostly familiarity.
Rewrite this with your own experience: the moment fear kept you safe, the moment it lied to you, and the practice that helped you tell the two apart. — Written by the editors.